Gabriel Cortez, an escaped drug dealer, has outsmarted the FBI and is one step ahead of them on his way to the Mexican border.

He hits a small, podunk town called Sommerton Junction, and runs into Sheriff Ray Owens, who formerly worked for the Los Angeles Police Department, and his deputies.

“They decided to take a stand, and that’s when it really becomes a movie. And that’s probably my favorite part,” said Andrew Knauer, a West Chester native who came up with the story idea and wrote the screenplay for “The Last Stand.”

Coming the theaters on January 18, the movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Owens and Eduardo Noriega as Cortez. Knauer wrote the story because he felt Hollywood had stopped producing action movies, although several come from overseas, such as “Taken.”

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“What I wanted to do years ago was kind of revitalize the American action movie,” said Knauer.

Knauer, 34, went to film school in New York, but moved back to West Chester after graduation. At 23-years-old he decided to really give screenwriting a try.

“I decided well, I went to school for this, let me see if I can really make a go of it.” He moved to LA in 2004 and went to grad school for a master’s degree in screenwriting. And that’s when it occurred to him how few action movies Hollywood produced similar to his childhood favorites such as “Diehard,” “Predator,” “48 hours” and “ Total Recall” – some of which star Schwarzenegger.

“If I could wave a magic wand, and anybody who’s walking the planet could be in the movie, it would be Arnold,” said Knauer. “It’s kind of surreal to think that his movies are such a big part of the reason why I decided to do this, and now his comeback is my movie.”

Knauer wrote “The Last Stand” as a spec – which means he wasn’t asked to write it, but wrote it for himself with no guarantee that someone would buy it.

“That’s really the best stuff sometimes, when it comes from a writer,” said Knaur. “There was a move, and there still is, a really big move to do preexisting material” – such as the Twilight movies and the comic movies. With preexisting material, the title will be instantly recognizable to the public and more people will go see it.

It took Knauer about 3½ months to write “The Last Stand,” after he got fired from a low-paying film industry job in July 2009.

“I wrote the script while I was unemployed. So I had nothing but time to write, so I really blew right through it,” said Knauer. “I kind of felt a sense of urgency writing it.”

Lionsgate bought the $40 million budget movie in October of that year. Knauer had interned at Lionsgate and befriended Hernany Perla, who became the creative director there and was the biggest help to Knauer in getting the film off the ground.

Writing wasn’t the hard part for Knauer. “The difficult thing was once the producers got attached and they had ideas and other people started to have ideas and it was my first time dealing with that on a real scale,” he said. “Just kind of coping with the pressure of you spent the last eight to nine years trying to get your chance, now you have it. Don’t blow it.”

Knauer likes storytelling, fell in love with screenwriting in college and had the confidence to do it.

“It never felt beyond me. There are some things that do. When I hear good music, that’s beyond me, I’m not capable of creating that,” he said. “But when I watch a good movie, I never felt like I can’t do that.”

But the industry is still a difficult one to break into.

“It’s hard and I’m not really in love with the behind the scenes part of the industry. I don’t think anybody likes that,” said Knauer. But for as long as people enjoy reading his work, he will keep writing, and he has only just started to get some recognition in the industry with “The Last Stand.”

“I think it’s a really fun movie,” said Knauer. “It’s a grounded fun, high octane, action movie. And I think there will always be a market for that. I know it’s the kind of movie I liked.”